[Others.046] Where on earth is "Toowoon Bay"?

I read an article talking about property investors using real estate web sites to look for cheap houses.

Just for fun, I did a quick search for "Town Houses" under $300,000 in NSW on realestate.com.au, and it returned quite a lot of hits. I switched to "Map" view and moved around, the first one I checked was as below, this 2 bedroom townhouse in Toowoon Bay (The others were all too far away...)

I've been to The Entrance a few times, but have absolutely no idea about the rental market over there. So I switched to the "Rent" view, entered "Toowoon Bay" as suburb and as below, it returned 3 houses, all with 2 bedrooms and within $210-$245 range.

Next is the fun part. I switched to "Map" view again to see whese these 3 houses were located, and as below, strangely I got a blank screen. The bottom of the map says "Map data 2009 Europa Technologies", ok, but where is this?

I zoomed out a bit and as below, noticed some arabic writings all over the places. What the??

Walla! I zoomed out a few times and as below, found that it's actually pointing to Algeria in Africa, with Barcelona/Madrid of Spain just above. And the top of the page still says "Displaying 3 homes for rent in Toowoon Bay"!!

Must be my first time lucky, as I tried a few others and none of them seems to have this problem...
Any way, will report to realestate.com.au and hopefully they can quickly fix it...

[Others.045] Nice features of new houses in California

During my short stay in California, I found quite a few nice features which I like to share with everyone.

---

The most impressive feature is the high ceiling, which I think is about 10 feet/ 305 cm high. The dark brown door in photo below is the main entrance, the plain white door at the far right is the garage door which is about the same height as the normal door we have here. Compare the gap between the doors and the ceiling and you can see the difference.

---

The next feature I like is the smooth/round edges for all the walls. This would certainly be more child friendly than the sharp ones we have here.

---

I also found they all have a big tray under the washing machine in the laundry, similar to this one. This would protect the floor from been damaged.

---

There's also wallpapers been applied in some of the rooms. And as below, the light switches were beautifully covered with the wallpaper.

The switch at the far right has some sort of built-in sensor, which probably would turn on the light when it detects any movement. This certainly looks better than a separate sensor been installed on the ceiling corner and less wiring required.

[BlogSite.028] Home Sweet Home

I was away for a while, stayed in the sunny Los Angeles California for weeks, enjoying the beautiful sun shine and inexpensive food/shopping thanks to strong Aussie dollars.

Also visited some new display homes and found lots of interesting ideas which is quite different from what we have here in Australia. Will post some information to share with everyone later. It's really great to be back home again...

By the way, I decided to change my blog template back to the previous one, as the new template isn't wide enough.